Search form

Opencast 3.0 Release

Opencast 3.0 has been streamlined to better address Adopters’ needs when it comes to their processes. This means the user experience and the efficiency of users performing their tasks have been significantly enhanced. Other major improvements are new features for the Opencast Player and even more flexibility when it comes to the integration of Opencast into external authentication and authorization systems.

The new features for this release are:

Streamlined Video Editor – The video editor has been streamlined to better support the Adopters’ processes, significantly enhancing the efficiency when it comes to publishing content. Metadata and comments can now be edited directly in the video editor – saving the time to navigate within the UI to perform this almost always required steps. Keyboard shortcuts can be used to gain further efficiency.

Streamlined Keyboard Accessibility – The introduction of keyboard shortcuts and vastly improved support for tab navigation across the administrative UI allow users to more efficiently interact with Opencast.

Improved User Experience – The user experience has been approved and streamlined at many other locations. For example, the user is presented configurable defaults for the input masks used to schedule recordings. The capture agent status is now additional indicated colors. The event counter filters have been reordered to match the life cycly of recordings. Series dropdowns are now sorted alphabetically and can be searched. The access policy page now supports search and filtering.

Piwik Integration – The Opencast video player now comes with out-of-the-box Piwik support so that user statistics for the player can be easily gathered and visualized

Caption Support – The Opencast video player now supports captions

Users and roles – The management of users and roles has been significantly improved to better support intergration of third-party user providers (e.g. LDAP, Sakai). The administrative user interface has been extended to better support externally provided roles. A new custom role provider allows Adopters to integrate their custom roles in a seamless way.

OAI-PMH – The OAI-PMH implementation has been completely revised. Now implemented as independent communication channels, an arbitrary number of OAI-PMH repositories can be handled by the Opencast OAI-PMH server. A new OAI-PMH metadata prefix provides direct access to Dublincore metadata catalogs, promoting a strong decoupling from external OAI-PMH harverster

AWS S3 and Cloudfront Support – Opencast now supports distribution to Amazon S3 and Cloudfront. This support is built into the workflow engine by default and requires only minor configuration. Details on how to set up S3 and Cloudfront distribution can be found here

Extended Themes – The themes facility that allows producers to let Opencast brand their produced video content using intro and outro videos has been extended to support title slides (metadata within video content) and watermarks.

Capture Agent API – The capture agent API supports a new error state that can be set by capture agents to indicate errors. Note that the API is, of course, backwards compatible.

Migration Aid – The Ingest REST endpoint has been extended to offer functionality required when migrating data from older Opencast versions. A workflow specifically designed for data migration has been added.

Library Update – Many libraries have been updated to more recent versions. Most noteworthy, Karaf has been updated to version 4.0.8